Fate Of Hostages Still Unknown

July 11, 2007|By MUBASHIR ZAIDI and LAURA KING, Los Angeles Times

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — The fate of scores of hostages was still not known late Tuesday after elite Pakistani commandos fought their way room-by-room into a heavily fortified radical mosque in the capital's heart, killing the chief cleric and more than 50 of his armed followers and arresting dozens more.

At least eight soldiers also died in more than 20 hours of fierce fighting that began early in the day and appeared to be winding down after dark.

But debate was only beginning over whether the battle for Islamabad's Red Mosque would prove boon or body blow for the administration of President Pervez Musharraf, whose political standing already was precarious after months of battering by a burgeoning pro-democracy movement.

Analysts say Musharraf's degree of success in rehabilitating his political image with a forceful stand against Islamic militants will depend in part on the final toll in the mosque conflict; the extent to which the dead cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is embraced as a martyr; and whether there is a significant armed backlash from the country's many extremist Islamist groups, which in the past have proven themselves capable of staging suicide attacks in Pakistani cities.

"These events could enfeeble or embolden him," said Samir Puri, a defense analyst at RAND Europe, said of the general who seized power eight years ago. "If he is seen to have been decisive, and as having acted in the interests of maintaining law and order, this will emphasize his claim, and the army's, to being the custodians of the nation."

The death toll could rise sharply as troops conduct a painstaking search of a labyrinth of rooms, some of them booby-trapped, inside the sprawling two-acre compound. The site carried heavy symbolic weight, given its proximity to the capital's diplomatic enclave, government ministries and the president's office.

According to New York's Newsday, most of the approximately 300 students trapped in the siege were killed.

Authorities appeared to be preparing Pakistanis for heavy losses among those whom the raid was meant to rescue. Deputy information minister Tariq Azim somberly told reporters that "all of those who were killed were Muslims," and "most were innocent."

The assault on the mosque began before dawn with a burst of explosions and gunfire that echoed across the neatly manicured capital.

Throughout the day, helicopters circled overhead and armored vehicles and ambulances rumbled, while sobbing parents of students at two Islamic seminaries inside the compound waited behind barbed-wire barricades for word of their relatives' fate.

The chief cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had insisted in interviews from inside the besieged mosque that he would die rather than give himself up. He made his last stand in the basement of the mosque, where military officials said he and his followers used students, including women and underage boys, as human shields.

Nearly 90 people escaped or were freed in the first hours of the fighting, authorities said. In the days before the compound was stormed, soldiers blew holes in the walls to try to provide escape routes for hostages. Some students were shot by the militants while trying to flee the compound, the government said.

The standoff, months in the making, began in earnest July 3 when militants inside fired shots at Pakistani police. As the siege tightened day by day, Musharraf's government tried repeatedly to negotiate with the mosque's militant defenders -- acting out of concern, officials said, for those being held inside against their will, particularly women and children.

Last Wednesday, more than 1,100 people left the compound that at one point housed two schools with a combined enrollment of about 5,000 students. Among those who fled that day was Ghazi's brother and fellow cleric, Abdul Aziz, who dressed in a woman's head-to-toe veil and tried unsuccessfully to slip past police.

Government negotiators made a final effort to achieve a resolution that broke down hours before the assault began, with Ghazi demanding unconditional freedom for himself and his followers.

Some of the militants killed and arrested in the fighting were described by authorities as hard-core members of known Pakistani terror groups. *